Mark Kelly, American

Many large strains of current American history are contained in the compressed story of his year

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For much more on Mark Kelly and Esquire's Americans of the Year, pick up the December 2011 issue.

Just before noon on April 29, 2011, Mark Kelly stood in his orange launch suit and waved at the crowd of reporters around him. He was beside the silver Airstream called the Astrovan, which would carry him and his five crewmates to the shuttle Endeavour, boiling away on the nearby pad. If there was such a thing as just another astronaut, he was no longer it. He had been thrust into a different American spotlight four months earlier, when his wife, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, was shot in the head outside a grocery store in Tucson. His already extraordinary life had been made even more singular by the introduction of a radical particle named Jared Lee Loughner. Now as much as everything else that Kelly was, he had become the husband of a woman made famous for having somehow survived a bullet's passing through her brain. And right alongside her, he had become the embodiment of American hope against very long odds.

There was a 70 percent chance that Endeavour would lift off that afternoon; at least, there was only a 30 percent chance that thick cloud cover would interfere with the day's big plans. But everybody, the astronauts most of all, knew that weather was only part of the equation. There were still a million possible reasons why the space shuttle might not do what it was expected to do. It was an unpredictable machine.

Kelly, a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and a naval officer for twenty-five years, at home in Houston.

Kelly smiled and waved one last time before he boarded the Astrovan. A few miles away, his wife was making her own preparations. In the months leading up to that 70-percent-chance-of-sun morning, Kelly and Giffords had been the twin subjects of intense speculation. There were suggestions that Kelly might choose to stay home with her, monitoring her slow and painful recovery, rather than fly into space. The people making those suggestions weren't astronauts.

Somewhere along the way, astronauts diverge from the rest of us. The pilots, especially, become something different. Their standards of "ordinary" change, particularly after they've traveled into space, and Kelly had gone up three times already. He was now forty-seven years old. He had become a naval aviator in 1987; he flew thirty-nine combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. Next he became a test pilot, one of the best, spending more than five thousand hours in more than fifty different aircraft. Nearly four hundred times, he had landed his plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Each time, he had looked out his cockpit at the rolling ship below, slipped down, and hit his throttle just as he was landing. It's counterintuitive, but throttling up meant he'd have enough power to lift back off the deck in case something went wrong. It was one of a Navy pilot's most important lessons: Sometimes the best way out of a bad situation is to hit the gas.

In space, Kelly had received further instruction in catastrophe. On his third trip into orbit, he had delivered a part to the International Space Station, where the residents needed badly to fix their broken toilet. His previous flight had been only the second after the Columbia disaster. Astronauts understand: Something always goes wrong. On the day his wife was shot, during the torturous flight that Kelly, his mother, and his daughters from a previous marriage made from Houston to Tucson, there were twenty minutes when he thought he had lost his wife for good. He was flying on a friend's private plane, and he had turned on the TV to watch reports of the shooting. "It was a terrible mistake," he said later. In the chaos, someone said that his wife was dead. His mother practically screamed, he remembered after; his daughters cried. Kelly retreated to the bathroom. "I just, you know, walked into the bathroom and, you know, broke down," he said. Eventually, he managed to get through to someone at the hospital, and he found out then that Giffords was, in fact, alive. "As bad as it was that she had died," Kelly said, "it's equally exciting that she hadn't."

Like a lot of astronauts, Kelly sometimes speaks in the present tense about the past. It's as though their lives undergo a kind of time compression after they've been into space; it's one of the many aftereffects of that incredible view. All those years and all that experience suddenly feel more like one fleeting moment. That sensation makes it impossible for them to say no to returning to space, just as it was always going to be impossible for Kelly to turn down his seat on Endeavour. Life gives us only so many chances to be weightless.

Before Kelly and the rest of his crew could strap in that April afternoon, their mission was scrubbed. The weather had held — the skies were wide open and blue. But a small part inside the machine had not: specifically, an electrical circuit in one of the heaters in Auxiliary Power Unit No. 1. That meant there was a risk that the fuel running through its lines would freeze in space and the shuttle would lose power to its hydraulic systems. The shuttle had experienced what they call a "hard failure." The Astrovan turned back around.

Not many people knew about it, but the shuttle was equipped with a retractable pole. In case of a very particular emergency — one that took place in the earth's atmosphere but did not destroy the shuttle quickly; one that not only made it necessary for the astronauts to escape their ship but somehow also gave them the chance to do so — they were meant to deploy this pole. It would swing out from the cockpit and its far end would push clear of the tail. The astronauts were trained to slide down the pole, like airborne firemen, and be thrown clear of the back of the stricken shuttle; next they were taught to deploy their parachutes and float gently to earth.

They knew it was a ridiculous plan. They understand that chaos still reigns over all of us.

Nevertheless, the astronauts trained to use that pole, and more important, part of them still believed in it. When Columbia exploded, the three men who were then orbiting in the space station remembered the pole. They wondered whether their friends had made it out of their cockpit and were now sitting on the side of a Texas hill, waiting for someone to pick them up. Their reasoning was simple: If long odds sometimes won for bad — 1.5 percent of the time, space shuttles blew up — then sometimes they could also win for good. Why couldn't they be survivors?

More than two weeks after its scrub, Endeavour lifted off beautifully and carried Kelly into space one last time. Mindful of his year, the imminent end of the shuttle program, and the fragile state of the American psyche, he made a short speech from the cockpit in the seconds before ignition: "As Americans, we endeavor to build a better life than the generation before, and we endeavor to be a united nation," he said. "It is in the DNA of our great country to reach for the stars and explore. We must not stop."

In that way, Kelly was perfectly prepared for his year, and for the hard years no doubt to come. Even his biggest plans have changed. But in a strange way, he had trained his whole life for this. He had been taught to reach for perfection, but he had also learned how to adjust in the face of system failures, of faulty electrical circuits, and of bullets. Thousands of hours in cockpits and space have given him perspective.

Sometimes, the best way out of a bad situation is to hit the gas.

For much more on Mark Kelly and Esquire's Americans of the Year, pick up the December issue, on sale soon